Thermical characterization of a microchannel head sink in single phrase liquid cooling

Abstract

Single phase microchannel cooling techniques are a promising solution to solve the problem of cooling requirements in the electronic devices and their increasing heat flux dissipation. The overall thermal resistance of the cooling solution needs to be reduced to improve the performance. The interface that attach the chip with its heat sink has a big impact on the overall thermal. Therefore a low thermal resistance interface is in focus in this work. Transient experiments and finite element models are used to characterize the interface. The heat sink is experimentally tested with different operating steady-states conditions to identify trends in its behaviour. The thermal properties of the heat sink are extracted. A comparison of the contribution of the heat sink and the interface to the total thermal resistance is made. The results show the high impact of the heat sink in the overall thermal resistance. It makes it possible to use this methodology for heat sink optimization. An error assessment study is made to analyse the accuracy of the results.